They might get another chance to kill Fritz; animation legend Ralph Bakshi has said that his next project will be a sequel to his cult fantasy allegory Wizards. A seminal work in the twin fields of “anti-war animation” and “large-breasted cartoon women who have the hots for guys who kind of look like Ralph Bakshi,” the original film told the story of an evil wizard who rises to prominence through the power of a lost cache of Nazi war propaganda. Now, Bakshi says he’d like to turn that same Tolkien-on-acid approach to the situation in the Middle East, which he apparently sees as rife for his particular brand of lampooning: “The Middle East today is going exactly in the direction I saw in Wizards. The ecology, and the warming of the planet…the destruction of Israel, which everyone’s getting ready to do again. That’s something I’d like to talk about.”
Bakshi was discussing the potential project during a longer interview about his Kickstarted short film The Last Days Of Coney Island, a brash, aggressively weird piece that marks the animator’s first major effort since his feature film Cool World was taken away from him back in 1992. Fixated on the 1960s and a particularly gritty vision of New York, Coney Island is being sold through Vimeo, and, if it’s a success, could pave the way for the 77-year-old animator to return to the world of Peace, Avatar, and surprisingly anti-climactic gun fights once again.